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Product Overview

TrendCare is a clinical decision support and workload management solution specialising in; patient acuity / patient nurse dependency measurement, clinical pathways and care plan management, patient assessments, and outcome measures. The TrendCare solution is the result of 16 years of research and development in the areas of patient acuity, workload management, clinical resource management and clinical costing.

Recent versions of the TrendCare system have included other functions such as; discharge analysis, bed management and patient diet ordering. A rostering system and a human resource management component is also included to track staff competencies, training, performance reviews and staff utilisation. HRM data entry and retrieval is fast and reporting features are comprehensive and practical. The advanced HL7 messaging and interfacing capabilities of the TrendCare system enable data to be imported and exported from and to other information systems so that there is only one entry point for patient and staff data. In this way data reliability is maximised.

The TrendCare acuity, clinical pathway and care planning system caters for a wide range of patient types. These include; medical, surgical, intensive care, coronary care, maternity, labour ward, neo-natal intensive care, special care nursery, paediatric, paediatric intensive care, day surgery, rehabilitation, renal dialysis, mental health, emergency, short stay, palliative care, interim care and residential care. Surgical specialties can also be measured and managed.

TrendCare acuity indicators, category timings and patient types have been trialled and validated in private and public hospitals across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Ongoing research ensures that specialty categories are revalidated with indicators being adjusted/upgraded to accommodate changes in practices/patient treatments when necessary. Ongoing research related to patient categories, timings, indicators and definitions with user site participation ensures that the system remains reliable. User sites conduct regular inter-rater reliability and data integrity audits to ensure site-specific reliability.

In 2005 Dr Virginia Plummer of Monash University completed a 3 year doctorate study confirming the accuracy and validity of the TrendCare system in Australian, New Zealand and Thailand hospitals. The study concluded that hospitals currently using mandated ratios as a method of staffing could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, improve patient care and allocate fairer workloads if they rostered nurses according to patient needs / dependency by using the TrendCare system to establish their ratio profiles.

The TrendCare clinical information system is patient focused and very user friendly as it has been designed and validated by expert clinicians. Many TrendCare user sites have achieved significant improvements in quality care, staff satisfaction and efficiencies by using the system. The success of the system can be attributed to the reliability of the tool and the method of allocating fair and equitable workloads to staff. Improvements to workload management have been achieved by using TrendCare data to measure peaks and troughs in clinical workloads due to changes in patient activity and acuity, and re-engineering rosters accordingly. Reports generated by the system enable nurse managers to measure the impact of identified trends and changes in patient activity and acuity over time and enables nurse leaders to work collaboratively with finance managers to appropriately resource nursing services for the future.

The multidisciplinary clinical pathway and clinical outcome options of the TrendCare system enables clinical staff to define the standard of care required for patients, and the expected patient outcomes. The clinical pathway system facilitates variance tracking and analysis, and contains automated patient history, risk management assessments and outcome assessments. TrendCare provides comprehensive clinical pathway reports and graphs which can identify potential areas for improvements in care planning, pre surgical patient preparation and clinical processes.

The TrendCare system provides nurse managers with the necessary information to identify and manage patient risks, monitor patient outcomes and variances to clinical pathways, develop realistic nurse patient ratios, HPPD targets and budgets, distribute fair workloads to clinical staff, retain an adequate skill mix, monitor staffing costs and develop accurate nursing cost weights for specific DRGs or patient types.